The Wines of Washington

Eastern Washington State has a rich agricultural heritage. While famous for the quality of its apples and sweet onions, Washington is also a major grower of wheat and hops. But increasingly, the world is taking notice of the quality of its fine wines. Washington's wine industry has gone through a tremendously rapid evolution. And the reasons were, we finally realized what we have here are physical conditions. The soil, the geography, the climate, the position on the globe are really the things that combine to let us know we can make wine here in Washington. There are striking differences between the eastern and the western sides of the state. Most people, when they hear Washington State, they probably think about the west side, Seattle, and the coastline of Puget Sound, which is a very wet place for most of the year. But then, right on the west coast is the Cascade Mountain Range that runs north-south. And that basically blocks almost all the rains going east. The eastern 3 quarters of the state of Washington State is actually, it's a semi-desert. And this desert actually starts in Mexico. It's called the Sonoran Desert. This is just the last little fingernail of it right here. It's very dry, very warm, very unlike the heavily wooded areas you'd find over on our coast. The challenges in growing grapes here are different than many regions around the world. The major issues for the industry are winter freeze, spring and fall frosts, and the lack of precipitation. Water rights for irrigation are difficult to acquire. It gets, on average, about seven inches of rain a year. And that is actually one of the unique advantages that Washington State has because we can give water to the plant when it needs it. You add to that weak soils that have low fertility, lots of sunshine, lots of heat, and we're able to ripen a wide range of classic European grape types. Varieties in Washington range from common to experimental. While the state made its reputation on Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, attention is turning towards Syrah and other Rhone varieties. Additionally, producers are increasingly willing to take risks working with lesser known grapes. Fortunately, land prices are low enough here that there's still a lot of experimentation going on that's not bound, like, let's say you go to Napa and you pay 300 grand for an acre. You almost have to plant Cabernet and charge 100 bucks to possibly ever have some expectation of a profitable business model. Towards here, you can still take an acre and put in Oleonico or throw in a half acre of Riesling and see how it works out. And so I think there's still a really adventurous spirit here. Accompanying the state's red varieties, Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, and Sauvignon Blanc are widely produced. The region's rock and soil profile is unique, the result of past volcanic activity and the Missoula floods. The Missoula floods, as these floods are known, are the largest documented catastrophic floods in earth history. A vast lake stretching across parts of present-day Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana had formed behind a series of glaciers at the end of the last ice age. So when it broke through, it swept away the glacier and it would have carried icebergs embedded in it the size of large buildings. And this whole mass came roaring down across eastern Washington. And then it all had to fit through a narrow gap called Wallula Gap. At one point, the water moving through Wallula Gap would have been approximately two or three miles wide, 900 feet deep, and moving at about 45 miles an hour for about a week or so. And that's a volume of water equivalent to 10 times the combined flow of all the world's rivers. When the floodwaters came down, they would have been full of sediment, basalt-derived sediment, granite-derived sediment that was just being swirled around and ground into a fine powder and sand. The topography of eastern Washington is littered with rocks and boulders brought by the floods, adding geologic diversity to its volcanic past. This is a really great outcrop because it shows the two fundamental components of most Columbia Basin vineyards. One is the basalt bedrock, which is this really hard lava material that was erupted like 15 million years ago and formed this solid, dense rock we call basalt that's really rich in iron and magnesium. And then overlying it is this really soft material that was blown in here by strong winds after the Missoula floods. And the silt has actually a chemistry that's quite a bit different from the chemistry of the underlying basalt because it has a healthy component of granite derived from far to the north and carried in here by the glacier floods. When European settlers arrived in the region, they planted grapes in eastern Washington's volcanic, loess, and alluvial soils. Wine grapes were in the ground before Washington achieved statehood, but the state's wine industry did not really begin to take shape until the 1970s. A lot of the early history of Washington's grape industry, wine industry, was built on juice grapes, concordes. The industry got serious when Professor Walter Klor started scratching around eastern Washington to find the ideal places for vinifera wine grapes. Chateau Saint-Michel's 1972 vintage Riesling beat all the other competition from Australia, California, and Germany in a classic taste-off by the Los Angeles Times. So people immediately thought, well, Washington's north, so it's gotta grow Riesling. Well, the truth is, as we started playing with Chardonnay and Cabernet and Merlot, we realized that by picking and choosing that right spot, we could come up with expression and character. This dry eastern half of Washington state where our grapes grow is now defined by an overall appellation. We call it the Columbia Valley. The Columbia River drains the entire appellation, so that gave its name to this viticultural district. The total acreage for this is huge, but what we've been able to do is identify specific subregions, subappellations within the Columbia Valley that give us unique character. Yakima Valley is the oldest of these appellations. The Yakima Valley is reasonably close to the proximity of the ancient Cascade Mountain range, so a lot of the soils are quite volcanic. We have a lot of sandstone, volcanic pumice. Some of the vineyards have a lot of gravel. It's broad, varying altitudes, and a real serious range of grape types that can be grown successfully in the Yakima Valley. What a lot of people recognize as Washington State Riesling, that's the Riesling from the Yakima Valley. At lower elevations, Concord grapes are common. On the hillsides and plateaus above where the risk of frost and freeze is lessened, wine grapes thrive. Contained wholly within Yakima Valley are several smaller ABAs, Rattlesnake Hills, Snipes Mountain, and Red Mountain. The hottest of these regions is Red Mountain, right in the center. It's a very small appellation, but real high heat accumulation during the growing season. Here on Red Mountain, we kind of separate ourselves from the rest of that plateau, the Columbia Valley, essentially, largely because it is exceptionally dry here, and that dryness actually changes the character of our soil. And what it does, it allows the calcium carbonate that blows around the world. You'll think of that as limestone, only it's dust, limestone dust, blows around the world, and where it rains, it just dissolves and goes away. Here, it doesn't. Here, it forms pieces of our soil. While many varieties can be grown on Red Mountain, its signature is Cabernet. The grape easily achieves high levels of tannin and deep color, and the results are among Washington's most distinctive wines. The state's most recognizable growing region, however, is the Walla Walla Valley. Walla Walla is unique for a lot of reasons. One, it's just a really charming place culturally. Walla Walla was like the center of the Northwest for about 10 or 15 years before Seattle and Portland really got established as port cities. We're a little bit higher rainfall because of the Blue Mountains, and so it's a little greener, a little lusher, so it's just not that really harsh, sagebrush-arid desert climate that you see in so much of eastern Washington, but yet we've still got those really dry growing season. Walla Walla is this unique goulash of soil types and altitude ranges, and we're looking at some very specific character for Merlot, for Syrah, and Cabernet Sauvignon. Walla Walla has a number of individual sub-regions, including the rocks across the Oregon border and the wetter eastern areas near the Blue Mountains. Additionally, many Walla Walla producers source grapes from vineyards throughout Washington, including Yakima Valley, Red Mountain, and the Horseheaven Hills. The Horseheaven Hills, where you have reds that focus on these wonderfully long, elegant tans, the Cabernet and the Merlot, to me, are the real stars from that area. They emerge with finesse and elegance and length. From humble beginnings, Washington has emerged in the recent decades as one of the United States' leading producers of fine wine. Had you given me a crystal ball 40 years ago and said that Washington today would have had well over 800 wineries and 50,000 acres of classic grape varieties, I would have said, you're smoking something funny, okay? But it's a reality today. There are limitations, like water, winter, and frost, but Washington is overcoming its challenges. The state's growers and winemakers continue to refine their work with classic grapes, explore new varieties, and better match their vines to climate and soil. The hero of our story will always be the terroir of Washington. It's why we grow these grapes. I don't see a limit on where we can go with this. There are literally hundreds of thousands of acres that can be planted and produce classically-styled, Washington-character, high-quality wine. 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